Category: privacy and anonymity

Over the past few months or so I have bought myself a bunch of new domain names (I collect ’em….). On some of those names I have chosen the option of “domain privacy” so that the whois record for the domain in question will show limited information to the world at large. I don’t often …

Yesterday’s Independent newspaper reports that HMG has let a contract with five companies to monitor social media such as twitter, facebook, and blogs for commentary on Goverment activity. The report says: “Under the terms of the deal five companies have been approved to keep an eye on Facebook, Twitter and blogs and provide daily reports …

Well, that didn’t last long. When I decided to force SSL as the default connection to trivia I had forgotten that it is syndicated via RSS on sites like planet alug. And of course as Brett Parker helpfully pointed out to me, self-signed certificates don’t always go down too well with RSS readers. He also …

In my post of 8 May I said it was now time to encrypt much, much more of my everyday activity. One big, and obvious, hole in this policy decision was the fact that the public face of this blog itself has remained unencrypted since I first created it way back in 2006. Back in …

Theresa May hasn’t wasted any time. The Independent reports today that Ms May (Home Secretary in the coalition administration) has said that the new Tory administration will bring the Draft Communications Data Bill, previously blocked by the Liberal Democrats, back to the House of Commons with the intention of getting it passed into law. As …

On Thursday 11 December, Roger Dingledine of the Tor project posted the following email to the “tor-talk” mail list (to which I am subscribed). I’d like to draw your attention to https://blog.torproject.org/blog/solidarity-against-online-harassment https://twitter.com/torproject/status/543154161236586496 One of our colleagues has been the target of a sustained campaign of harassment for the past several months. We have decided …

I get my domestic ADSL connectivity from the rather excellent people at Andrews and Arnold. Here’s why. And this is the original reason I moved to them. They also happily take (and similarly reply to) GPG encrypted support questions. Good guys. Thoroughly recommended. Now can you /really/ see BT doing any of that? ‘thought not.

My newspaper of choice, the Guardian, has for some time produced its own android (and iOS of course) app. I have often used the android app on my tablet to catch up on emerging news items at the end of the day. I also read the BBC news app for the same reason. Yesterday I …

In February of this year, Poul-Henning Kamp (a.k.a “PHK”) gave what now looks to be a peculiarly prescient presentation as the closing keynote to 2014’s FOSDEM. In the presentation (PDF), PHK posits an NSA operation called ORCHESTRA which is designed to undermine internet security through a series of “disinformation” or “misinformation”, or “misdirection” sub operations. …

For any readers uncertain of exactly how the heartbleed vulberability in openssl might be exploitable, Sean Cassidy over at existential type has a good explanation. And if you find that difficult to follow, Randall Munroe over at xkcd covers it quite nicely. My thanks, and appreciation as always, to a great artist. Of course, Randall …

The Guardian and the Washington Post have been jointly awarded the Pulitzer prize for public service for their reporting of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on the NSA’s surveillance activities. The Guardian reports: The Pulitzer committee praised the Guardian for its “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark …

I was contacted recently by a guy called Andy Beverley who wrote: Hope you don’t mind me contacting you about one of your old blog posts “what gives with dban”. Thought I’d let you know that I forked DBAN a while ago, and produced a standalone program (called nwipe) that will run on any Linux …

At the tail end of last year I mentioned a couple of tools I had used in my testing of SSL/TLS certificates used for trivia itself and my mail server. However, that post concentrated on the server side certificates and ignored the security, or otherwise, offered by the browser’s configuration. It is important to know …

An exchange of emails with Mark over at bsdbox.co a day or so ago made me realise that my privacy policy needed updating. Not, I hasten to add, for any fundamental reason, but simply because a couple of the references in that policy were out of date. I have therefore amended it and version 0.2.0 …

The Open Rights Group here in the UK has been campaigning against mass, unwarranted surveillance by GCHQ since the Snowden revelations first emerged in summer of last year. Two of its current campaigns are: “don’t spy on us” and “the day we fight back“. I have signed both of them. I have also written to …

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“Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.”